30.10.05 - "All Souls" - Faure Requiem

The offer by the Orlando Singers to present the Faur?à Requiem in a liturgical context was linked to this Sunday as the Sunday closest to All Souls Day. All Souls Day falls on 2 November, the day after All Saints Day. Given that All Saints Day focussed on the recognised saints and martyrs of the Church, All Souls Day began as a commemoration of every other Christian who had died. The vast majority of Christian people down the centuries are not saints in the popular specialised sense of the word. But families and communities needed to remember and honour them every bit as much as the heroic and truly admirable women and men of faith, and so the day evolved.

By the late Middle Ages, commemorations of All Souls had become caught up with shonky theology and popular superstition. Purgatory had been invented, a place where souls went to undergo purification before being received into heaven. Masses for the dead, and Masses on All Souls Day, were held in the belief that the prayers of the faithful could affect the time spent in purgatory by those souls which were as yet neither lost to hell nor rejoicing in heaven. Hence some of the language of the requiem ?± asking for eternal rest, for deliverance from hell, for perpetual light to shine upon them, and so on.

There is a irony about this requiem mass taking place in a Presbyterian church on this particular Sunday. In the Churches of the Reformation, particularly Lutheran and Reformed or Presbyterian Churches, this Sunday is known as Reformation Sunday. It honours and commemorates the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation which ?± among other things ?± did away with masses and prayers for the dead, as superstition.

Back then, depending upon the teaching of the particular Church you belonged to (which in turn usually depended upon which king you were subject to), everyone had a pretty clear idea of what happened when we died. The pre-Reformation Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory as a longer or shorter staging-post between earthly life and heavenly bliss was countered by Reformers who came up with the equally peculiar doctrine of predestination, which said God had already decided who would be saved and who would not, even before they die ?± in fact, even before they are born. What a strange God that conjures up!

These days, if you were to ask members of any mainline denomination what they believe about what is beyond death, you would hear a wide variety of responses. Some of the responses might be more or less biblically-based; many would not and might have little resemblance to the official teaching of any church. Consciously or unconsciously in this pluralistic age we have all been influenced by a variety of ideas which include reincarnation, notions based on reports of near-death-experiences, popular sentimentality about meeting up again with deceased parents or partner, through to nothing at all. The Bible isn??t a great deal of help in all this, because it too contains a variety of understandings of what happens and you can take your pick from them.

The language of the requiem mass reflects some of these choices. For example, there is the beautiful imagery of In Paradisum which assumes the person who has died may already be being received into the heavenly Jerusalem, welcomed by the martyrs and a heavenly choir. Then there is the idea found in the fearsome imagery Libera me which assumes the day of the Last Judgement. If you were to take the language of the Libera me literally, the prospects are rather terrifying, and it could sound like the most bizarre

expression of loony evangelical theology. Of course, it could also represent what astrophysicists tell us, that eventually the earth and the solar system will be destroyed as the sun explodes in its dying gasp; or that the entire universe will implode in some kind of reversal of the Big Bang.

My hunch would be that most are here today because of the beauty of Faur?à??s music, rather than the language of the requiem mass, and also rather than any huge desire to remember our dead. The implications of some of the language of the requiem mass are secondary, if they even register at all. But most if not all of us value opportunities to focus for a brief time on those who have gone before us, especially those most recent and close to us. Consciously or unconsciously John Donne??s line about "no Man" (or "no Person", if Don Brash doesn??t mind us being linguistically politically correct), "no Man is an island, entire of itself" resonates within many of us. We know we are connected not just to all other living persons, we are also connected to our own ancestors. And we know within ourselves that who we are stems from who they were.

Today the beauty of evocative music rather than any literality of ancient language is offered to us as a vehicle to rightly honour those who have given us so much ?± not just life itself, which is a big enough gift, but the things that make life worth living; like those ancestors who chose to emigrate here to Aotearoa New Zealand, and those who fought to defeat tyranny, those who imparted a love of music and those who gave a passion for human dignity, those who passed on the way of the Spirit to us and those who taught or showed us the way of love.

The requiem mass also reminds us of our own mortality, of the inescapable knowledge that we too one day will die. "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee?ñ" The great words of faith and the timeless actions of the sacrament, surrounded by great music which touches the soul, can speak to us ?± if we will allow it ?± of the God who loves us much more than we often dare to think, and much longer than the life we live. The God who loved and who loves those who have died into God loves us their descendants every bit as passionately.

So we can invoke the evocative language of rest and light and peace, of promise, deliverance, and victory, not so that it will somehow make God love us more, but so that it reinforces the greatest gift of all. That is, the gift of life before death; the gift of this life which is most truly alive when it is lived in harmony with others and in harmony with God ?± whatever may be our experience and understanding of the Holy One.